Regulating the operations of drones, rotorcraft, multicopters, and other unmanned aircraft systems (UAS; also small UAS, or sUAS) is a puzzle that has yet to be completely solved at the federal level, even while states and municipalities attempt to devise and impose their own rules. This puzzle has many pieces; for example, flights over people, extended beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, and remote identification of UAS. Remote identification, or RID, means that local and ground-level law enforcement officials (LEO) and first responders encountering a UAS will want to know, first and foremost, two things. First, who is it; in other words, who is the owner or operator of the UAS in question? Second, are they allowed to be here; does the owner/operator of this UAS have permission or authorization to operate the UAS in a particular airspace?
RID may assist LEOs in their investigations by, for example, providing eyewitnesses a means of positively identifying a UAS, in the same manner that a tail number may uniquely identify a manned aircraft. Further, RID solutions may aid UAS operators in providing separation assurance (e.g., detect-and-avoid) between their own UAS and other nearby UAS, or between the UAS and manned aircraft who might not otherwise be able to “see” them. For example, UAS traffic does not yet fit into next-generation surveillance radar systems such as Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), leaving visual recognition as the only means for pilots to identify most UAS—a means which is often unreliable due to the small size of many civilian UAS.
To be widely deployable, any UAS-based RID solution must take into consideration the potential for spectrum congestion, either at manned aircraft frequencies (e.g., specific frequencies allotted for next-generation ADS-B communications between aircraft) or among high density UAS traffic, and adverse effect on overall system performance. Further, any solution should consider the size, weight, power consumption, and cost (SWaP-C) considerations of sUAS mobile platforms, as well as the convenience of integrating or retrofitting RID solutions as aftermarket components. The smaller the UAS targeted and included, the more UAS overall are able to participate. Finally, RID solutions remain functional within internet-denied areas.